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Comm 101 - Week 12

Terms in this set (32)

Music before media
• Music was mostly available through live performances (concert halls, churches, traveling groups), people buy street music, play instruments
o Real world example: People performing street music
o Significance: Artists will always find a way to perform; culture diffusion → music was spread organically
Analog vs. Digital -- And consequences of technology
Analog recording captures the fluctuations of sound waves and stores them in the physical part of the record. Digital recording translates sound waves into numerical code.
- Real world example: Records/tapes versus CDs
- Significance: The evolution of technology, CDs made music easier to listen to and paved the way to MP3s.
Pop Music
Music that appeals to the mainstream public.
- Real world example: Katy Perry, Lady Gaga
- Significance: Reaches a wide audience, can have an impact on the public.
Rock n' Roll Revolution (and race)
Rock music integrated the black sounds of rhythm and blues and gospel, with the white influences of country, folk and pop.
- Real world example: Jimi Hendrix covering Bob Dylan
- Significance: Some of the first music to have such a diverse set of influences. Blurred racial lines.
Rock n' Roll (and social change)
• Rock n Roll distributed the binaries of high and low culture as well as gender and sexuality
• Radio becomes increasingly desegregated because black musicians and white musicians cover each other music
o Significance: Rock n roll broke down many boundaries
Appropriation
: The use of borrowed elements in the creation of new music
- Real world example: Using elements of Rhythm and Blues in Rock and Roll
- Significance: Different musical styles developed out of similar musical elements. Some genres, like rock and roll, are a mixture of different elements of different genres
Payola
The practice of record promoters paying deejays or radio programers to play particular songs
- Real world example: 1950s payola scandals: demand for airplay grew, independent promoters from record labels used payola to pressure deejays into playing songs by certain artists.
- Significance: Undermined rock and roll's credibility for a number of years. Congress eventually added a law concerning payola to the Federal Communications Act
British Invasion
- Origin of rock's global impact traced to England in late 1950s
- Significance: Verified that rock and roll performers could write and produce popular songs
Motown
- Transformed the industry by introducing soul, which mixes gospel and blues with emotion and lyrics drawn from the American black experience
Punk
-Challenges the commercialism of the record business
-Attempted to return to the basics of rock and roll
-Not a commercial success in the United States
-Helped introduce women bands and reopen the doors for rock experimentation
Folk
-Refers to songs performed by untrained musicians and passed down mainly through oral traditions
-Significance: Usually the sound of social activism (i.e. political action)
Psychedelic
-Introduced alcohol and drugs and used them to help with personal expression
Glam rock, hair bands
-A style of rock music first popular in early 1970s, characterized by male performers wearing exaggeratedly flamboyant clothes and makeup
-Pretty boy glammers meet bad boy rockers
Grunge/alternative
Updating the spirit of punk
- Grunge is a subcategory of alternative rock
- Appeals to college students and those in their 20s
Hip-hop
-A term for the urban culture that includes rapping, cutting by DJs, breakdancing, street clothing, poetry slams, and graffiti art
-Significance: Gave black artists a way to express themselves on politics and serious issues
Music Business
-The business of music is divided into several areas (i.e. making the music, selling the music, and sharing the profits)
-Significance: Three music corporations control 90% of the industry
Profit Sharing
- The record company reaps the highest revenue, the artist bares the bulk of the expenses
- CD division-- Artist is responsible for paying managers, band members, attorneys, and usually end up with nothing
- Digital—Itunes gets 30% of every song sale, artist gets 15%, and record company gets the rest
Ownership
- Artist doesn't have full control over song, because record company is in charge of hiring musicians and handling production of beats
- Some groups (example Nine Inch Nails) don't use record company, use the Internet, so they control their music
Copyright
A copyright legally protects the rights of authors or producers to their published or unpublished writing, music, lyrics, TV programs, movies, or graphic are designs. These days, the concept of copyright is important because many people do not acknowledge the rights of content, and download illegally violating the law and their properties.
Royalties
Royalty is a usage-based payment made by one party to another for the right to ongoing use of an asset, usually an intellectual property. It should be protected as a compensation for licensor who the production.
Ex. Spotify has paid out $500 million in royalties to rights holder so far in 2013 and $1billion total since 2009.
Music as a tool of social control
• Music is often tied to social control (politics, race, sexual norms, gender norms)
• Music can alter social boundaries
o Real world example: John Lennon and the Beatles constantly had songs focused on War, politics, and other social issues
o Significance: Music can exert influence over people and in turn alter their thoughts on certain topics
Music as a site of resistance/revolution
• Music is a way to express ideas that you may have kept quiet otherwise
• Ex: youth culture and rebellion through rock and roll
Mass Culture
It refers to the current western capitalist society that emerged and developed from the 20th century under the influence of mass media.
Ex. Lady Gaga
Culture Industries
Channels of communication
Significance: music helps shape our identities and comforts us during the transition from childhood to adulthood, and it stirs debate amongst parents and teenagers; teachers and students; and politicians and performers which leads to social change
Electric Guitar
• Development of electric guitar dependent upon technical knowledge
o Related to radio hobbyists/tinkeres, military
• Amateurs lead the industry in innovations rather than established manufactures
• Electrification turns the guitar from a musical instrument to a powerful machine
• Model names relate the electric guitar to other prestigious technologies
• Significance: Becomes a tool of power; gives people a new creative form of expression; gives men a new way to embody masculinity
Rock & Masculinity
According to Simon Frith & Angela McRobbie (1978), "rock is a male form" and the industry is male run. Men construct suitable female images; market masculine style. The concept is needed to be understand the fact that successful women performers are primarily singers.
Ex. The genre, rock, is usually represented by male singers, and they show their masculinity through performing rock.
Cock rock vs. Teenybopper
Cock rock is the music, which is an explicit, crude,
and often aggressive expression of male sexuality.
Ex. Jimmy Page & Robert Plant of Led Zeppelin
- Teenybopper is based on
self-pity, vulnerability, and
need, and songs are about loneliness and frustration.
Ex. Justin Bieber

It is important to compare and contrast to find the differences and similarities between cock rock and teenybopper. It is the binary oppositions of music marketed towards men and women, and it reinforces gender stereotypes.
Guitar as Technophallus
this is the term from Steve Waksman and it means that guitar becomes a technological extension of the body. "Phallus" denotes penis, but connotes power. Ex. Clip from Purle Rain.
Symbolic Annihilation of Female Rock Musicians
1) Treated as ahistorical
: multiple moments characterized by women in rock, and it reinforces they are women first, musicians second
2) Myth of rebellion
: essentializing
3) Myth of lineage
4) Fiction of femininity
: allows authenticity of women's performance to be called into question
Ex. Courtney Love
Rock, Women, & Gender Transgression
• The nature of given social institutions and what they forbid or encourage in various classes of individuals
• Traditional constructions of gender and the masculinization of technology
o Real world example: Riot grrrl movement
o Significance: Women are supposed to act more domestic and womanly and follow the social constructions of feminism in society which is therefore why women in rock transgress the stereotype
Riot Grrrl
• Not just music, but a feminist movement
• Values polysemic femininity
• Co-opted by the mainstream and turned into "angry women of rock"
o Post feminist- the illusion of feminist independence while clinging to traditional feminine ideals; feminism is no longer necessary
o Increases visibility of female musicians
o Real world examples: Bikini Kill, *** ** Jill, Bratmobile, Adickdid, Bangs
o Significance: Gave women a new channel to voice their inequalities, were able to address real world issues through their music
Girls Rock Camp
• First nonprofit rock n roll for camp girls founded in 2007
• Girls Rock camp alliance founded in 2007 - now a global movement with over 40 affiliates
o Real world example: Camps exist all over
o Significance: Mission to empower girls and women using music education to foster self-esteem and confidence
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